This refers to the editorial “Wages of neglect” (July 16). I would like to add that the lack of employability and job-specific skills of a large number of people from the young workforce coupled with the failure of the central and state governments to translate their plans into effective measures may deprive India of a great opportunity to march forward. Though only 2 per cent of the existing workforce has some skills training and 89 per cent of the working age (11-59 years) group has no vocational training, the state of 6,909 Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) is pitiable. Dropouts, vacant faculty positions, obsolete and poor-quality courses, and lack of multi-skilling have limited their appeal to the industries as a source of employment. The government’s efforts to utilise public private partnership model in ITIs did not yield desired results with merely 2.8 per cent utilisation of the allocation of Rs 1,500 crore for two years.
In the year 2004-05, the government had chosen 100 ITIs to be developed as centres of excellence “for producing multi-skilled workforce of global standard”. It also set up an Institute Management Committee (IMC) comprising 11 members from the industry and the government to promote public-private partnership. Unfortunately, the laudable scheme does not seem to have gathered much momentum — one more example of good planning falling because of indifferent execution.
Y G Chouksey, Pune
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